Why it'll be OK in revision.

I always write with this in mind. It works for me to get it down then fix it.

I do the same, but sometimes I still get the quigquams.

SwallowFeather said:

I heard a writer on a podcast say that the rough draft is like hacking your way through a jungle, and when you write the last word it's like a helicopter lands & picks you up & you can fly up and see all the landscape & the path you've made from above. It really is like that.

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That's a great image which, I feel, is particularly true for those of us who are pantsers.

It's really liberating when you give yourself a license to write crap. I read a really crappy published novel to inspire me to write garbage. I actually need to find another one. I got a lot more garbage to write.

There is a method to my madness

And yay for writing garbage. But I'm def excited for my second draft.

Agaric, my frog prince with severe PTSD and a drinking problem as a result of he and his entire kingdom being turned into frogs--which was his fault--and him being the only survivor, due to frogs having incredibly short lifespans and his father getting into an argument with a duck (Agaric also has a thing about birds as a result) has gone through about four or five surnames, and his kingdom's been renamed about as many times.

Hell, just me working out how he drinks alcohol (he knocks the bottles off a shelf and drinks the puddles) took about three goes before I got it right.

kwanzaabot said:

Agaric, my frog prince with severe PTSD and a drinking problem as a result of he and his entire kingdom being turned into frogs--which was his fault--and him being the only survivor, due to frogs having incredibly short lifespans and his father getting into an argument with a duck (Agaric also has a thing about birds as a result) has gone through about four or five surnames, and his kingdom's been renamed about as many times.

Hell, just me working out how he drinks alcohol (he knocks the bottles off a shelf and drinks the puddles) took about three goes before I got it right.

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I'd like to read this story.

SwallowFeather said:

Just something I've been thinking about (and thinking about putting over my desk, if I had one).

If your first draft sucks, remember that in early drafts of Lord of the Rings, Aragorn's nickname wasn't Strider... it was Trotter.

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Delboy! And Rodney (you plonker)!


ETA: just in case the cultural reference is too UK specific, it's Rodney that's the plonker. Not you or anyone on this site!

On the subject of very different 1st drafts...Sherlock Holmes' name was Sherrinford Hope on the first draft.

Just a little fact I thought I'd share.

EDIT: I only know this fact because the OP's fact about the name changes in Lord of the Rings made me curious about famous bad first drafts. Thus, I looked up fun facts and there you have it.

I just also wanted to say that it's okay to have this mindset for each of your drafts especially if you're rewriting a scene, changing dialogue, adding or cutting something big, whatever. It took me nine drafts to get it right (and I'm still contacting my editor for one last thing).

This has been on my mind a lot lately. With my first book, I, for the most part, tended to edit as I went along. Well, that ended up taking me forever to finish the book. With this new one, I'm letting go of my instincts to fix or improve things along the way. It's hard not to edit when I know something could be better but it will still be there to edit when I finish. Plus, I'm writing at a faster pace now that I'm not editing too.

That's a long way of saying that I'm okay with letting my first draft suck!

Writing a first draft is onerous to me as I have to drag every word kickin' and screamin' from my head. Ah, but revision. I adore revision. My favorite writing quote comes from Bernard Malamud and it's exactly how I feel about revision: "Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing."

My problem has never been questioning if I need to revise my work, but summoning the energy to do it. Another problem I have is attempting revisions too soon after completion (by revisions I mean major changes, not just spelling and grammar).

I plot in advance - so when the first draft is done, the major chunks of the story are there and they kinda fit in place.

Usually I only allow a couple of days to rest before hitting the first editing pass, and the early passes aren't about grammar so much as I'm looking at the character arcs and searching for plot holes. I take a lot of notes as I go through the story, often with separate pages for each character, and also events to be sure every action has a motivation.

If I'm writing for an unfamiliar POV - I look for readers to see if I have it right.

Grammar etc. creeps in during the later edits.

It normally takes between 10 and 12 editing passes before I send it off to my editor.

Editing takes much longer than the plotting and the first draft. It's a lot of work, but as is said here, in the end it's OK.

I always go through a couple rounds of revisions before anyone else sees my WIP, and I don't mind revising, but...

For me, there is a point at which revising a work simply isn't worth it. Fortunately, this hasn't happened to me in several years. The last time was NaNoWriMo 2014, and when I read the book over a couple months later, it was so terrible that I decided it would be faster to write something new than try to fix it. I'm glad I didn't bother revising that one. The entire thing was just so badly broken. Yes, I'm sure I could have fixed it somehow, but I was better served by writing something new.

So "you can't edit a blank page" advice often makes me feel a bit uncomfortable, because there are times when a blank page really is better for me that a pile of absolute shit. But of course this isn't true for everyone

Luckily, though, things like names are easy to change. I had four characters whose names started with Ch-- in my current WIP (somehow I didn't notice), and it took five minutes to sort that out.